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I honestly think you're over-complicating this. Surly the goal of this project is not to give experience of/insight into the world of game development, but just to make a game with everyone?

As soon as you form a dedicated team to work on the game (which will be difficult), you create a divide between them and the community. The team will have the last word on what happens with the game, which means they can easily ignore the community if they want to. There may also be a degree of elitism about it. To me, this sounds no different from any other fangame, which I've said before is a bad way to go about this. The community as a whole ends up as nothing more than a fringe audience, and ends up not feeling very connected to the game they're supposedly helping to make, which is the opposite of what a community project should be.

No, everyone should be treated as equally as possible, to allow everyone to feel as much a part of the game as everyone else. Hence my pass-it-around idea. It's not a teaching thing, it's a way to get everyone involved. By its nature, it solves the problem of multiple people working on the same/conflicting things at once, as well as (mostly) avoid any possibility of elitism and exclusion, and the problem of malicious/accidental corruption (the archiver archives every week's version by themselves).

I disagree that pass-it-around would be slower than dedicated-team. The quick pass-it-around encourages broader and less complex contributions (e.g. mapping/eventing rather than scripting), which means more maps will be created, which means more of the game itself will be created more quickly. Conversely, have a look at all the fangames which buried themselves in details and stalled/failed. Essentials is good enough to make a game all by itself without needing to re-script things, isn't it? It's supposed to be, after all.

Of course, the community can work on more substantial things than just plot while someone else has possession of the game. Region maps, Pokédexes, tilesets (if desired), perhaps even some scripting can all be done independently, and given to the current possessor to add in. This gets the community even more involved.

Maruno rotation idea seems interesting, but I thinks that the big problem are that one week can be too much/little to do certain things, may generates problems with continuity, and is too serial. The most effective (in my vision) are some groups with:

Quote originally posted by Nintendork15:

But then, that's basically the over Game Team.
But we could have different classes like;

Mappers

Scripters

Spriters

Event Makers

Concept Artists

Story and Plotters

and have them form a group every week, So one week is based on mapping, the next is scripting.
But Concepting and Spriting can be done when required as it's not AS big of an job.

Each group have a leader and maybe coordinators, with the main development team and only the main leader of main development (who needs to be very active) needs edit the main project. The key is to make separate and parallel things, like sprites that, with a group leader that manage people to don't do the same thing (rework is a great enemy), works very well in parallel, even with dozens of people. With maps and script may work with copy/paste the file/script changes. The main leader only needs to combine everything and done one thing or other, like events, and even may do with models done for other people. Maybe the leader launch some builds (maybe open source) every 1-3 months to the group have a model to follow. Of corse, some people can be in more than one grop at same time.

The project will remain as long that exist people with interest and a minimun skill to pass the torch forward, keeping an active project holder.

Quote originally posted by Maruno:

I've had this thought too. It'll be very difficult to pull off, though.

If you go for the "one leader/coordinator, everyone else contributes", then it's practically no different to any other fangame being made. The "contributions" will only be vague suggestions, meaning no actual work will get done except by the leader, who will inevitably give up once they realise they're stuck doing everything by themselves. Also, the community will never agree on anything (plot/pacing/Pokémon/mapping/etc.), so no progress will be made there anyway unless someone (the leader) takes charge and defines a direction - in which case, again, it's no different to any other fangame.

Just as I said, the main problem is the lack of interested people with certain skill level. If you divide the work to one people/group to update the tilesets/charsets, one people to update the PBS, one people to do the maps, among others, this can be very more quicker.

Quote originally posted by Maruno:

As soon as you form a dedicated team to work on the game (which will be difficult), you create a divide between them and the community. The team will have the last word on what happens with the game, which means they can easily ignore the community if they want to. There may also be a degree of elitism about it. To me, this sounds no different from any other fangame, which I've said before is a bad way to go about this. The community as a whole ends up as nothing more than a fringe audience, and ends up not feeling very connected to the game they're supposedly helping to make, which is the opposite of what a community project should be.

Maruno rotation idea seems interesting, but I thinks that the big problem are that one week can be too much/little to do certain things, may generates problems with continuity, and is too serial. The most effective (in my vision) are some groups with:

In parallel instead of per week.

Each group have a leader and maybe coordinators, with the main development team and only the main leader of main development (who needs to be very active) needs edit the main project. The key is to make separate and parallel things, like sprites that, with a group leader that manage people to don't do the same thing (rework is a great enemy), works very well in parallel, even with dozens of people. With maps and script may work with copy/paste the file/script changes. The main leader only needs to combine everything and done one thing or other, like events, and even may do with models done for other people. Maybe the leader launch some builds (maybe open source) every 1-3 months to the group have a model to follow. Of corse, some people can be in more than one grop at same time.

The project will remain as long that exist people with interest and a minimun skill to pass the torch forward, keeping an active project holder.

Just as I said, the main problem is the lack of interested people with certain skill level. If you divide the work to one people/group to update the tilesets/charsets, one people to update the PBS, one people to do the maps, among others, this can be very more quicker.

Continuity would be sorted out by people discussing it in the project's thread, as well as the occasional tidy-up volunteer (I said I might volunteer to do that). The allotted time per person could be different, or vary according to what each person asks for (to a limit) - I suggested a week as a starting point, since no one knows what the optimal way of working this kind of idea would be - it hasn't been done before.

I honestly doubt a project like this which requires teams and team members will be able to gather them all, let alone retain them. You said this yourself. I don't think there's any advantage to making teams out of people rather than let people make contributions if/when they want. Committed people will work regardless of whether they're called "part of the team" or not.

I've already said that other people can do things in parallel with the current week's volunteer. I gave examples of town maps, Pokédexes and so forth, and that could quite easily apply to maps too. It'd be up to the volunteers to add those contributions into the game (if they want to). I did notice that you apparently assumed a complete replacement of all the graphics would be required, which is a rather silly thing to assume.

Besides, the point isn't necessarily about speed (not that I think pass-it-around would be appreciably slower than other methods anyway). It's about it being a community project. "Serial" or not, it lets everyone have an equal go at it. Surely that's the point of calling it "communal"? Don't dismiss it just because it's different, because it is different and may well require a different approach to every other fangame.

This isn't a wiki, this is a game. Wikis automatically allow everyone to contribute regardless of the leadership structure. If Wikipedia only let nominated staff edit articles, and asked the rest of the world to discuss and propose changes (which could simply be ignored), then it would be more like what you're proposing. It would also be rubbish, obviously, and definitely couldn't be called a community project.

If there is a team and/or leader (preferably just 1 person, if any), then their job should solely be to make sure things don't get out of hand (this doesn't include preventing the game from turning into something they don't personally like). The less intervention on their part, the better.

Continuity would be sorted out by people discussing it in the project's thread, as well as the occasional tidy-up volunteer (I said I might volunteer to do that). The allotted time per person could be different, or vary according to what each person asks for (to a limit) - I suggested a week as a starting point, since no one knows what the optimal way of working this kind of idea would be - it hasn't been done before.

Continuity that I'm saying is to understand the code/event variables used. To someone successfully does this, this person needs to virtually browse thought several events and keeps a good eye on changes. Of corse, this can be considerably speeds up if this have a good documentation, but some details will be missed. This also will be hard to get ideas and has other people rotation problems.

Quote originally posted by Maruno:

I honestly doubt a project like this which requires teams and team members will be able to gather them all, let alone retain them. You said this yourself. I don't think there's any advantage to making teams out of people rather than let people make contributions if/when they want. Committed people will work regardless of whether they're called "part of the team" or not.

Besides, the point isn't necessarily about speed (not that I think pass-it-around would be appreciably slower than other methods anyway). It's about it being a community project. "Serial" or not, it lets everyone have an equal go at it. Surely that's the point of calling it "communal"? Don't dismiss it just because it's different, because it is different and may well require a different approach to every other fangame.

But speed is a important element. Slow results may make people (and public) to lose interest.

Like I said, your idea is interesting, but, in my vision, I don't think that is the most effective that with leaders.

Quote originally posted by Maruno:

This isn't a wiki, this is a game. Wikis automatically allow everyone to contribute regardless of the leadership structure. If Wikipedia only let nominated staff edit articles, and asked the rest of the world to discuss and propose changes (which could simply be ignored), then it would be more like what you're proposing. It would also be rubbish, obviously, and definitely couldn't be called a community project.

If there is a team and/or leader (preferably just 1 person, if any), then their job should solely be to make sure things don't get out of hand (this doesn't include preventing the game from turning into something they don't personally like). The less intervention on their part, the better.

One problem I found though was the fact that we would probably never decide on ideas for stories, Pokemon/Fakemon, certain maps, certain characters, ect.

But then I thought, since it is a Community Project, why not get the Community decide by polls? Anyone who's got ideas for the above stuff could post it in a thread and the community could vote on which one they'd like the most, and it'd get the whole community involved in the community project lol

I've been going around today advocating use of a revision control system for many projects, and it is all the more important for projects like this with multiple developers. It will be chaos if there is no organization, but if the people involved familiarized with a strong VCS such as Git, Mercurial or Bazaar they an easily handle multiple developers in a project (however, it would not have the same consistency as traditional software project due to lack of native support).

There should be an organizational leader, such as someone who hosts the repository, manages the thread, since there can only be one of those, but due to the transparency of a VCS the community will not see one person as the project spearhead.

There is an alternative, though, and it's one I've been thinking about and which may have potential. One person works on the game at a time, and possession rotates between those who volunteer in turn. There is a strict time limit of 1 week per person, during which time they're allowed to do anything they want to the game (including undoing/redoing other people's work without remorse). At the end of their week, they send a download link to the next person on the list, and post a summary of what they've done for everyone to see. If they fail to do either of these things, their efforts are ignored and the previous week's version gets passed on instead (both the revised game and the summary are required, as it's a team effort and there shouldn't be secrets or hidden information between members; otherwise their work cannot be accepted).

The advantage of this is that people can have a go at a bit of game-making for a week, and will only contribute if they're actually interested enough to volunteer (which means they will do something). The time per person (1 week) is kept relatively short to encourage actual progress, rather than letting it get bogged down with designing new-for-the-sake-of-new systems (not to mention keeping things going relatively smoothly if someone vanishes). Meanwhile, the thread for the project will have discussion about the latest week's changes, collaboration about the story and so on, and will help direct the suggested progress of the game - the current week's developer still has absolute free reign over everything, of course. In the end all the revisions and possessions and discussions should come together to form an actual game.

Obviously someone needs to start things off first, perhaps before even making a thread for this project (so there's something to start from). Or maybe you could say that the Essentials example maps are the starting point, rather than starting with a blank slate like normal, and for starters the aim is to expand/turn them into an actual game (plans can always change later). I don't know whether it's better to let everyone download every week's revision, or whether it should be passed privately between each person as their turn comes round (the project's coordinater should also keep every revision for archiving, which is their only purpose). Everyone should definitely be kept informed of all the changes made each week, though.

for something like this to work you would need a foundation, an agreed story/plot, tiles, and what not. I dont see it working if yu have no foundation to build from, if you don't it'll probably become a huge mess that doesn't make sense

I Think that to make a community project you would need a set of tools to collaborate. You should open a GIT repository or use Google Docs to be able to share ideas and such. I would suggest using my site but the tools are not implemented yet. I have had luck using code.google.com and use their project hosting. Maybe use the bug reporting system to take suggestions.

This is not that bad of an idea, but note "not that bad." The idea can either go two ways, become unbelievably hard to maintain communication between all the people who like to work on it, or becoming rather organised giving a smooth production. The thing about community projects is, there's always going to be a lack of communication in some point or another, leading to broken scheduled times of who's working on what etc. But if there's enough organisation in the project, I don't see why not. It'd at least bring the community together somehow

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